Finding your way home

Spontaneous Awakening

Awakening:  To know yourself as part of God and God as part of you.  To realize that you are not who you believe yourself to be.  You are Awareness in the vast ocean of energy we call God.  You are that which experiences, but you are not the experience.  You are the witness behind the experience.. that part of God which is experiencing itself.

In order to Awaken you must first realize that you are already in God.  There is no destination to reach.  There is nothing to become.  There is only the realization of that to experience.

To experience, you must first know what you are NOT.  You are not your story.  You are not your ego, or your beliefs, and you are not your pain or suffering.  You may be experiencing that, but you are NOT that.  Knowing this is the first step to finding your way Home.

The paradox is that your story and your pain and suffering ARE the way home.  You cannot deny, avoid, or get rid of your mind/ego or your pain.  That is only ego wanting to avoid itself.  Witness the stories you tell yourself and others, bring Awareness to  every aspect of who you believe you are at the level of mind/ego, and those things will fall away.  To bring Awareness to your stories is to bring Consciousness, and to bring Consciousness is to bring God.. and God is what you are.

Allow yourself to feel your pain when it arises.  Do not try to stuff it or avoid it or fix it.  Sit with it.  Bring Consciousness to it.  It is only trying to express itself.  Allow yourself to feel, and your pain will dissipate and Joy will follow.  It isn't fatal, as your ego believes.  It is part of the way to freedom.

This is your Way Home.  It's simple.. but not necessarily easy.  Do it and find out.

Re: Finding your way home

Dear John,

I've been here for a couple of weeks now and somehow I missed this.  But it is a perfect and beautiful assessment of the process I went through.  Only until this minute, I didn't realize that was where my “physical” pain was coming from.  I couldn't walk until recently.  For almost 4 years total I was in severe pain and disabled.  It's only been in the last 6 months my “physical” pain went away.  Thank you for teaching me more.

Peace, Love and Truth,
Zendi

Re: Finding your way home

John,

I just reread this and I'd love to tatoo it on my arm for ready access. 

It resonates so deeply, that I know this is truth for me…now to just remember it!

In gratitude,
Helen

Re: Finding your way home

Dear John,

For more than 30 years, I had been trying to know God and to know me; reading studying, meditating, praying, desiring etc..  And In January 2001 ( 2nd  of Jan to be precise ) I KNEW fully who I was.  And all the studying went out the window!!!   And what came with this realisation was more than I had bargained for.   My body began  to burn  from head to toe, energy was flying all over the place,  etc., I was in total agony,.physically and emotionally,  crying, groaning, growling, waking each morning with bruises  appearing on my hands and feet,  And this went on daily for a year.  Thank goodness I was in a position to take 18 months of leave, and simply close my hall door to the world, so I could process this awakening.

I used to cry out in pain, but whenever I  sat and wrote in my journal, all I could write was my own magnificat….not the scriptural one, but my words, because I knew  fully that the essence of who I was, am ,was ,is God.   My soul was magnifiying God…..

As a result of this spiritual emergency, whenever I entered into an altered state, I would cry in a tiny voice saying “I want to go home,I want to go home” .  This was both something from my physical past, and ultimately something much deeper.  And the connections I made both from the physical, emotional and spiritual  were profoundly healing.

I agree with you John, we are not our story; we are not our beliefs or concepts, and yes, when our painful past arises, we must not avoid it, but  enter into it fully, feel the  old pain, which we couldn't when we were children,  and move through it into the reality of now, and who we are.  Unless we become like little children, we cannot enter into the kingdom of God.   As Ken Wilber would say,  there is no progression without regression.

Isnt it great to be awake!!

Clare

Re: Finding your way home

Thank you for your beautiful post Clare.  Your awakening happened one day before my 51st birthday.  It's funny I don't remember the exact days that mine happened.. but the experience is still very much there.  You really experienced a big burn up (as Haydn calls it).  Mine all have been much more gentle thus far.  :-)  Leonard Jacobson has had six or seven of them happen to him, so you never know what might be just around the next bend in the road.  I truly and deeply know “I want to go home”.  Thank you again for your wonderful contribution.  It is indeed  GREAT to be awake!
peace/love
John

Re: Finding your way home

John,

Nice thread but I really don't know what to say.  That is because I'm there.  It was gentle.  The peace is incredible, the knowing is amazing, the shifts that occur are welcome.

The feeling is sublime.  I know the journey is what this life is.  This life is not all I am.

All the best,

Deb

Re: Finding your way home

Sometimes, the fortunate few have a Samadhi, or lightning awareness (Vajra, or Christ consciousness, or Holy Ghost). An “AHA” moment if you will. A flash of insight. One of the beauties of ZEN, and Vajrayana paths is the awareness of that possibility. May we all have an AHA moment today! 

Re: Finding your way home

Thank you for your post, John! Beautiful, filled with depth-realization, and right on!

Being what I be, I do not partake in the God concept but I do not feel in opposition to your realization.

Re: Finding your way home

Eckhart calls it Being.. which I think is undoubtedly a better word.  In my experience the All or Being is Consciousness, Awareness, and Immense, overwhelming Love.. and yet also Nothing.  At various points I've known myself to be Awareness in what I call “The Body of God”.. or Being.. on three different and yet not different occasions.. and this past September I experienced myself as No Thing for two days.  It is the divine paradox of Being as form and Being as formlessness at the same time.  Notwithstanding the fact that there are a great many negative connotations in the Collective to the word God, it all comes down to semantics really.  God, Being, The All, Allah, Great Spirit.. all are the same thing.
peace/love
John

Re: Finding your way home

I had posted this on another thread but I think it may belong here.

I'm going to say that my Awakening was that I could see that it is all a dream. Everyone has thier own dream but for one to be awaken, one has to see that everyone has thier own dream but they have not been in thier own dream but in everybody elses. Now that I have been awaken, I find the only suffering that I experience is when I get back into somebody else's dream. That help's me to know that I am not all the way awaken yet because when I am then I will not be getting into anybody else's dream. That is my goal and I am getting closer to it every day.

Your friend,Don